As you can see, this blog has a new look.  In part, that is because I had a website crash.  (Long story, but the upshot is we were using a template the developer abandoned, and it stopped working with WordPress.)  After panicking for a bit when the whole thing took the data on the site back to what was there at the end of 2020, I decided to look at this as an opportunity.  The site needed updating anyway, and now, I didn’t have any choice but to deal with it.

Going back through everything puts things in perspective.  Reading over all of your reviews of my work and testimonials for my teaching fills me with gratitude.  Thank you for showing up, in so many ways.

Sometimes it is good to get back to basics.  It can be so easy in our busy lives to put off organizing.  (As I have re-discovered while trying to recreate web pages with data harvested from Wayback Machine captures.)  And sometimes there seems to be this push forward, to finish a project that you never go back and see if the information in it is in the most effective order.  The same goes for writing projects, too.  Just because you wrote a draft in a particular way, it doesn’t mean you have to keep it that way if it would be better from a different viewpoint, or covering a different time period of the protagonist’s history.  And if you are writing nonfiction, you may want to swap the order of chapters in your book, or eliminate some of them altogether.  It can be difficult to make yourself do the work, but in the end the project will be better for it.

How do you view setbacks?  Are they often opportunities in disguise?  

I put Jake’s pic with this post because he did a HUGE amount of work on the website redesign. Thanks for everything, Jake. (And assistant Addi!)